This list of crank diets illustrates, if nothing else, how willing Americans are to try any weight-loss methods except the correct ones. While most of these are innocuous, calorie-cutting schemes, there are a few ideas, like the tapeworm diet (parasite yourself thin!) and the Russian peasant diet (bet those starving proles never have to squeeze into their summer pants), that sound utterly unworkable, as well as insane. (And did the tapeworms really come “jar packed,” like it says in the old ad shown here?) The real kicker is the diet where you’re injected with urine from pregnant women, which is apparently some kind of fat-blasting nectar from Olympus. It clearly doesn’t work, because nerds have been consuming pee under a different name for years now, and most of them are still fat.

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This list of crank diets illustrates, if nothing else, how willing Americans are to try any weight-loss methods except the correct ones. While most of these are innocuous, calorie-cutting schemes, there are a few ideas, like the tapeworm diet (parasite yourself thin!) and the Russian peasant diet (bet those starving proles never have to squeeze into their summer pants), that sound utterly unworkable, as well as insane. (And did the tapeworms really come “jar packed,” like it says in the old ad shown here?) The real kicker is the diet where you’re injected with urine from pregnant women, which is apparently some kind of fat-blasting nectar from Olympus. It clearly doesn’t work, because nerds have been consuming pee under a different name for years now, and most of them are still fat.